Journalist job market as a tournament game

The journalist profession, like other glamour, yet competitive professions - movies, advertising, sports, music, fashion - has a different dynamic in its job market. Swarms of bright young people throw themselves at grunt jobs that pay poorly and demand unstinting devotion. The author of Freakonomics compares this kind of job market to a tournament. Heard someone with a prestige liberal art degree, working as editorial assistant at a Manhattan publishing house, but merely earning $24,000? He/she is playing the tournament game.

The rules of this tournament are straightforward. You must start at the bottom to have a shot at the top, you must be willing to work long and hard at sub-standard wages. In order to advance in the tournament, you must prove yourself to be not merely above average but spectacular(the way to distinguish yourself differs from profession to profession), once you come to the sad realization that you will never make it to the top, you will quit the tournament.

Journalists have long suffered from what David Brooks (in his book Bobos in Paradise) identified as status-income disequilibrium. Journalists received low wages compared to their educations and other professions, but enjoyed higher prestige and job security. However, a recent article summarized that both the prestige and job security are fading as new types of on-line medias grab more and more of publics' consumption. There are many layoffs from tranditional publishers recently. Journalists' wages have been stagnating for years. Meanwhile, the wages for other professions (law, consulting, financial services, hedge funds) have been rising fast.

Nowadays, the tournament of Journalist profession is less worth fighting for.

Do Ivy League Colleges really pay?

I would say most people think the money will follow the Ivy League education, because Ivy League -
(1) provide better level of teaching;
(2) provide better level of social networking;
(3) they signal to future employers that the degree-holder worth paying more than average graduates.
The cost of a private college education, already astronomical, is spiraling upward faster than the rate of inflation. For years, economists have wrestled with the question of whether the future earnings exceed the hefty cost of Ivy League or equivalent private college in economic terms.
In 1997, Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby figured that men who entered a top-tier private college in 1982 will earn $2.9 million over a lifetime, versus $2.4 million for men who went to one of the most selective public institutions and $1.7 million for men from one of the least-selective public institutions. (numbers are in 1997 dollars.)
She figured student aptitude accounts for somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the earnings difference; yet even allowing for this, she found that it pays to go to the most selective college you can. "People who invest in education at a more selective college generally earn back their investment several times over during their careers," "In many cases," she added, "even students who are offered a 'free ride' by a lower-ranked college would maximize their monetary worth by refusing the aid and attending the higher-ranked college."
She compared students paying average 1997-98 tuition at a third-rank public college to those paying average tuition at a first-rank private college. Even adjusting for differences in student aptitude, the private school student would be expected to earn back the difference in costs more than 30 times over during the course of a working lifetime, far outstripping any possible investment returns on invested capital.

Another study done by Dan A. Black, an economist at Syracuse University, says you will make more by attending an elite college, "but it comes out awfully close to what you'd get in the stock market" if you invested the difference in price between a top college and a lesser state school.
In 1998, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute in Ithaca (New York) and colleagues found that "even after controlling for selection effects, there is strong evidence of significant economic return to attending an elite private institution, and some evidence that this premium has increased over time."
The problem is those "selection effects," meaning the tendency of top schools to admit the best and the brightest, who are most likely to earn big after attending any old college anyway. How to isolate those “selection effects” and study them? To address this, in 1998, Alan B. Krueger looked not just at the earnings of elite-college graduates, but also at the earnings of those accepted at elite colleges who chose to attend a less-selective institution. The researchers found that both groups of students earned about the same. That suggests that the students themselves--not the school--account for the difference. To Krueger, if you're smart enough to get into Princeton, you're smart enough to make a lot of money wherever you go to school.
After many conversations with tuition-paying parents, I think we should take all those data with a grain of salt and mix their findings with some common sense -
1) for some occupations, Harvard doesn't pay. If your kid is going to be a social worker or a programmer, going to Harvard will probably never pay off financially. And if your child wants to study studio art but is admitted to Cal Tech, there's no point paying for Cal Tech. Spend the money on a school with a better art program, such School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
2) if you live some place with a truly great state university (the universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, Illinois are good examples), only the very best private colleges are even worth considering as an alternative.

3) If your kids don’t deal well with high level stress (social and academic) situations, for health reasons, don’t go to Ivy League schools.
4) If you are minority and your and your kid gets into Ivy League , do whatever you can to send him or her. The Ivy League degree will send strong signals to future employers; many institution in both public and private sectors strongly favor minority graduates with a good degree.

Which company to work for ( big or small ) - Part 2

Numbers below from Harris Interactive's 2004 survay showing people working for smaller companies are happpier that those working for big ones :
- at larger firms (with 5,000 or more employees), 46 percent of workers overall are dissatisfied in their jobs; 45 percent said they are burned out and 38 percent said they have hit a dead end;
- at small firms (with fewer than 50 employees), 36 percent of workers overall are dissatisfied in their jobs; 39 percent said they are burned out and 24 percent said they have hit a dead end.

Hospitalist jobs - a fast growing medical specialty

Two years ago, my mother-in-law stayed in a hospital several days because of the knee replacement surgery. My wife and me recall we had a hard time to reach the regular (orthopedic) doctor for check-ups. We were in the dark for many hours or even a day. The doctor either was late for our appointments, or simply canceled check-ups. We were told the doctor was busy with outpatients in his office.
According to recent NPR report, nowadays more and more Doctors and hospitals are relying increasingly on hospitalists -- a relatively new specialty of physician who takes over the care of critically ill patients once they are admitted to a hospital. A hospitalist focus with issues unique to patients's hospital stay, thus enable other specialists more time in office focus on outpatients. In my opinion, hospitalists jobs are out of purely organic growth in the health-care industry, unique to US. This is a typical examples of labor division, which increase the efficiency of medical professionals.

There were only 100 or so hospitalists in US a decade ago; in 2005 there are 12,000 of them. Some people expect that could bypass the number of cardiologist in the near future.